As a company that focusses more on the business side of development, it is always a little treat when we get asked to help with projects that are a little bit different. That being said, we always enjoy a challenge. So when Steve from Litle Miss Raffles approached us with a spec to help him build a raffle based site - with a few pretty smart features - the team naturally got excited and wanted jump on board to help! From just a basic specification and a few ideas running about in his head, we were able to sit down with him and flesh out his plans with some visual mock-ups and process flows to help us all stay aligned on how this system works.

Starting this project in April of 2019, with a quoted 12 week lead time, the team quickly started to develop areas of Steves business dream so that he could get hands-on with his project pretty fast. One of the first pieces completed was the cataloguing system, this gave Steve the ability to upload his raffle items and display them, including their titles, descriptions, pictures and the price of the tickets for that item. One of our aims for both the admin and user sides of the system was to make them as easy as possible!

Our normal way of taking on projects is to build and complete the admin features first, this way we can ensure our customers can handle all issues on the customer journey, this also helps when completing a gap analysis of the process and means we can add any functions we may have missed.

Through the remaining weeks of the project, our focus turned to the end-users journey, ensuring their account setup was easy, the purchasing of raffle tickets was hassle-free and ensuring that this was easily useable and accessible from all devices. At the end of the day, the most important thing for a consumer-facing project is to make sure we don't over complicate anything.

The final thing we had to do to give Steves' site the final sign off was to get his logos, colour schemes and stylings in! Some companies have branding toolkits to hand that we work with, however, in some cases - and true for Steve - a few colours have been picked and a logo is available. In cases like these, we work closely with the  customer to ensure the user interface (UI) is exactly what they had in mind,